The Future of MySQL

Oracle owns a bit more than the name -- they have full copyright over the mainline source!<p>They are the only party that can sell commercial licenses to the mainline GPL code. All community forks will have to be GPL-only.

It's free software, right? Why would Oracle be in any obligation to support and put money in it? And why would Oracle not supporting it be any kind of problem anyway?

If you're a U.S. company dependant on MySQL to run your business, tell the DOJ about it so they "have a talk" with Oracle about not killing it.<p><i>For those that are worried about the future of OSS software as part of the Oracle / Sun deal, and the affect (both good and bad) it may have on their business, the US Department of Justice is encouraging companies that are dependent on MySQL / Java to contact them and tell them how the deal may affect their business. The more information the department gets, the better equipped they will be in deciding what their recommendation for the deal will be.</i>

Monty talked a little about Oracle at his talk at LinuxFest Northwest. Video can be found here - <a href="http://www.ustream.tv/recorded/1431407" rel="nofollow">http://www.ustream.tv/recorded/1431407</a><p>Basically, he said Oracle owns MySQL in name only. Most of the brains behind it are already working with him on MariaDB or Brian Aker on Drizzle. He promised that MariaDB would remain binary compatible with MySQL.

I suppose that you should care if you use it and rely on it for production applications. But if you use a commercial database (or one of the other OSS databases -- is Postgres any good?) then this doesn't really affect you at all.

but actually, I don't. Or rather, I do, in the negative sense.<p>I'd like it to die from a combination of owner neglect or malice from Oracle and death by a thousand forks.

No, I shouldn't care. If mysql dissappears there is postgresql and many other open source options.<p>All you should do is have an easy way to port all your data/code to the new database, which you should already have such backup plan, right?<p>Hosting providers should be aware and prepared to switch databases too.